In current data centers, Storage Area Networks (SANs) are frequently used to provide performance, isolation, reliability and high availability infrastructure required by the enterprise applications. A SAN typically includes various network nodes working in tandem to provide the benefits mentioned above.
In the physical world, an application server is connected to a SAN based target using a host bus adapter (HBA) and a switch. With server virtualization, multiple virtualized application servers generate data and store it to the SAN based target. The mapping of the application server to the underlying SAN node is typically obscured with virtualization.